If I Die

19

Tod called in sick to work, and we spent the next two hours on my couch, tangled up in each other both physically and emotionally. All at once, it felt like we were going too fast—like I was racing down the final hill on a massive roller coaster, determined to savor every intoxicated heartbeat—yet we couldn’t go fast enough. Because there wouldn’t be enough time.

I would never get to finish this ride with Tod—never fully explore this bond I’d discovered too late—and we both knew it. All we could do was live in the moment. So that’s exactly what we did. We lived in every single electrifying moment of the connection consuming us both, but destined to burn out early.

Between kisses that echoed and scalded the length of my body, I told him what it was like to save a life, and he told me what it was like to take one. I told him I was afraid of losing control—of being devoured by someone else’s will—but he already knew that. He told me he was afraid of being forgotten—of fading from humanity and simply ceasing to exist—but I already knew that.

Tod whispered his secrets, and I swallowed them whole, then fed him with my own. My hands wandered and his explored, waking in me cravings and impulses like I’d never felt. I wanted things—I wanted him—not out of curiosity and deadline-driven determination, but out of a raw need to experience all of him. To know and be known like never before. To share everything I had and everything I would ever be with him. And for the first time, the strength of my own hunger didn’t scare me. Because it was my hunger.

Then, finally, Tod groaned, pulling away to sit up on the couch, his hand splayed across my stomach, over the material of my shirt.

“What’s wrong?”

“Not a damn thing.” He brushed one curl back from his forehead, eyes churning with a craving that surely mirrored my own. “But I need a break.”

“Why?” I sat up, frowning.

“Because you feel really good, and I haven’t done this in a long time. Not since I died. So I kind of need to stop or…not stop.”

Then I understood, and my face burned so hot my cheeks could have been on fire. “Oh. I’m sorry.” Embarrassed, I put both hands over my face, but Tod pulled them down gently, and his blue-eyed gaze met mine.

“You’re embarrassed by proof that I want you? If either of us should be embarrassed by this, it’s me. But I’m not. I just need to cool down, so I can want you again in a few minutes.”

The blaze in my cheeks turned inward, scalding a trail down my center to points lower, until I thought my body would roast itself alive if he didn’t stop looking at me like that. Yet I hoped he’d never stop looking at me like that.

Tod laughed, and I groaned when I realized he’d seen what I was thinking—a twist of overheated blue?—in my eyes.

“How ’bout some lunch?” he said, and I stood, grasping at the offer of a distraction.

“I think we have some sandwich stuff…”

He followed me into the kitchen, and pulled open the fridge, then bent to investigate the meat drawer. “Just give me a minute. I’ll think about cold cuts.”

I burst into laughter. I couldn’t help it.

“Cold cuts are funny?” He stood, and I shook my head, still laughing behind one hand.

“I was thinking about something else,” I said, but he only watched me, waiting for an elaboration. “Em wanted to know if blood flow would be an issue for you, and now I can tell her that it’s definitely not a problem.”

Tod frowned, but good humor swirled lazily in his eyes. “I’m dead, not impotent. Nasty rumors like that must be quashed before they gain momentum. Feel free to emphasize how very functional I am.”

I laughed again, setting a loaf of bread on the counter while he sniffed a package of sliced ham. “How functional are you? And on a completely unrelated subject, if I get kissed for stupid arguments, what would happen if I did something really bad?” His pale brows rose, and his irises twisted faster. “How bad are we talking?”

“I don’t know. Failing to correct inaccurate, sexually defamatory rumors?”

“That would be bad.” Tod dropped the ham on the counter and pulled me closer, pressing me against the closed refrigerator door, and a spark shot up my spine and set fire to my lungs. “I think I’d have to take the situation in hand.” His right hand found my left one and his fingers intertwined with mine. His skin was warm against my palm while the fridge was cold against the back of my hand. With him pressed against me—all of him—I could feel how much he still wanted me. And that knowledge was exciting. Intoxicating.

“What if that wasn’t enough to do the trick?” I whispered, made bold by the blatant need churning in his eyes. “What if I were persistently bad?”

“That might require a stronger approach.” He leaned toward me and dropped a series of tiny, hot kisses down my neck, headed for my collarbone. I reached up with my free hand to feel his hair—the curls were so soft—and his left hand found the slight curve of my hip, fingers pressing into my skin beneath the hem of my shirt, like they wanted more than they could possibly find there.

“I don’t think this is fixing your little problem,” I whispered, as his hand wandered slowly over my waist and toward my ribs, over my shirt now.

Tod straightened and gave me a frown. “You should be careful, tossing descriptors like that around in a situation like this. My ‘problem’ isn’t little. Unless you’re drawing some pretty wild comparisons. Please tell me you’re not drawing wild comparisons. Or blood-relative comparisons.”

“Nope. No comparisons. That’s one limb of your family tree I’m not going out on. Are you comparing me to Addison?”

“To Addy? Hell no. Genna, maybe…” he teased, and I frowned, though I had no idea who that was.

“So how do I stack up?” I asked, not sure I really wanted to know.

“Kaylee, you burn so bright that everyone else looks dim in comparison. You’re all I see, and all I want to see, and I would be happy if this moment never ended. If I could spend the rest of my afterlife doing this…”

He leaned down again and started a new trail of kisses beginning at the hollow beneath my jaw, his hands flat against my lower back, like he couldn’t touch enough of me, even if we’d had nothing but time.

We spent the rest of the day on my couch, ignoring a succession of movies in favor of each other, holding back my fear of death and incubi with the feel of him. With the stories he told and the questions he asked.

Hours later, someone knocked on my front door, and I came up for air long enough to glance at the time on my cell phone. Almost 3:00 p.m.

School was out, and that was probably Emma at the door, and I knew I should go answer it. But I wanted one more kiss. One more minute for just me and Tod, and this moment we’d stolen from eternity.

One more minute, then I would do the right thing. The mature thing. I would start learning how to let it all go….

“I thought Sabine wanted in on this,” Emma said, helping herself to a cold soda from my fridge. She’d come over after school expecting our game plan powwow to include all four members of the Eastlake super league, but Sabine and Nash were, obviously, still MIA, and Tod had gone to check on them. And maybe to cool off again. “Don’t tell me she’s mad at you. She ought to be thanking you for finally giving her what she wanted.”

“It’s not that simple,” I said, then decided I didn’t want to spend any of what little time I had left rehashing that morning’s catastrophe. “Here’s the short version. Nash fell off the wagon—hard—and Sabine’s babysitting him.”

“What wagon?” She popped the top on her can and sipped from it.

“He’s on frost again, Em.” And Nash-on-frost was very different from sober-Nash.

“Ohh…” Emma dropped into one of the kitchen chairs and pulled one knee up to her chest. No doubt she was remembering Doug, her boyfriend and one of Nash’s best friends, who’d died of a frost overdose in December. “Is this because you broke up with him?”

“No,” Tod said, appearing beside me out of nowhere, and that time I didn’t even jump. “He’s upset because she broke up with him, but he got high because he’s an addict. He makes his own choices.”

“Okaaay…” But Em looked unconvinced, and I couldn’t quite quash the remnants of my own guilt.

Tod took my hand, his fingers winding around mine, and my chest tightened. Everything between us was new and shiny, a thrill that would never fade, thanks to my own imminent death, and the excitement was compounded by the fact that we were about to go fight evil together—like a one-up mushroom for our entire relationship. Yet Tod looked grim, even for a reaper. “Why didn’t you tell me what he did to you?”

Crap. Sabine must have told him.

“What did he do?” Em sat up straight, eyeing us both expectantly.

“Because I knew you’d blame yourself?” I said, throwing his own words back at him, but all I got was a deeper frown.

“What happened to ‘no secrets’?”

“I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to talk about it. I was mad, and humiliated, and I just wanted to forget about it.”

“Kaylee, you didn’t do anything wrong. Sabine knows it. I know it. Nash’ll know it, once he’s thinking straight.” His hand tightened around mine. “You have no reason to be embarrassed.”

“What did he do?” Em repeated, losing patience now.

“If I were stronger, I could have resisted. Sabine can resist him.”

“Sabine can just unleash his own fear on him and make him back down. You can’t.”

“What the hell did Nash do?” Em demanded, standing to get our attention.

“He tried to use his Influence to make her go somewhere private with him. Alone. So he could Influence her into taking him back.”

“That son of a bitch!” Em looked like she wanted to punch him, too, only maybe lower than Sabine had aimed.

“It’s more complicated than that. He was hurting. And anyway, it was the frost,” I insisted. No matter how mad he got at me and Tod, he wouldn’t have done something like that if he’d been clean. I was absolutely certain of that.

Tod was unconvinced. “It was him on frost.”

“Is he okay?” Em asked, settling into her chair again.

“Sabine and my mom seem to have it under control, at least for the moment,” Tod said. “But I don’t think we should count on either of them for backup tonight.”

“So, what, it’s just the three of us?” Em asked, and I was relieved to hear a tremor of fear in her voice. The real trouble would come later, when Beck unleashed his charm on her again, and she forgot to be afraid.

“What, you don’t think I can protect you?” I said, only half kidding as I ducked into the living room to grab my laptop from my backpack.

“I don’t doubt your bean sidhe skills, Kaylee.” Emma leaned back in her chair to see me around the kitchen doorway. “I just don’t see how they’re going to be any good against an incubus. I mean, we don’t even know how to fight him, short of a good hard kick to the groin.”

“You can’t go wrong with that,” Tod mumbled, looking distinctly uncomfortable at the thought.

“Except that by the time it’s time to kick him, that’s the last thing you’re going to want to do. Which is where this comes in.” I set my laptop on the kitchen peninsula and turned it on. “So far, we haven’t had much luck fighting Netherworld evil with tips from the internet, but Alec says that because they need humans to breed with, as well as to feed from, incubi have a long, and presumably well-documented history in our world.” And I was hoping that at least some of that history had made its way to the web.

“Ooh, I have mine, too, so I can double our efforts.” Emma claimed the second bar stool and plugged her laptop in next to mine. While we searched with Google like madwomen, Tod stood behind us where he could see both screens, reading and pointing out anything he thought might be useful.

“Is this chick for real?” Emma asked, about ten minutes into the research, and I leaned over to glance at her screen. “She claims she’s been communicating with demons that appear and disappear at night in her room since she was a kid, but now she’s tired of them and wants to know how to get rid of them.”

“Antipsychotic medication,” Tod suggested, scowling at the screen. “The internet is full of crackpots claiming to have personal contact with ‘demons’ who bear no resemblance to any Netherworld creature I’ve ever heard of, except for hellions. And if hellions could cross the barrier into your bedroom, we’d have bigger things to worry about than one horny incubus.”

“I wish you wouldn’t throw that word around like it’s harmless,” I said, elbowing him in the ribs.

“Horny?” Tod grinned.

Emma laughed. “She means crackpot.”

“Just because someone talks to things other people can’t see or hear doesn’t mean those things aren’t there, and it doesn’t necessarily mean she’s crazy,” I insisted. “She could just be having a series of bad dreams.”

The reaper’s brows rose in amusement over my automatic defense of the mentally unstable. “Or, she could have an over-active imagination and a pathological need to be the center of attention. With all due respect to those who’ve unjustly served time in mental institutions, people who are really hearing and seeing things they shouldn’t either go crazy—in which case a coherent internet plea for help would be improbable—or they keep quiet about their so-called delusions to avoid looking crazy.”

Tod spun my stool so that I faced him, then looked straight into my eyes, so I could see sincerity swirling in his. “You are none of the above, Kaylee, so you can quit worrying about that. But just because you’re not crazy or looking for attention doesn’t mean that—” he glanced at Emma’s screen, then back at me “—DemonQueen87 is in possession of all her marbles.”

“Okay, valid point,” I said, when I couldn’t find fault with his logic. “So, did DemonQueen get any advice we could use?” Just because her problem was probably bogus didn’t mean all the answers would be.

“Yeah, I don’t think so.” Em scrolled slowly, reading aloud as her finger slid down the mouse pad. “‘Banishing incantations…’”

“Bullshit,” Tod declared, rolling bright blue eyes. “Even if that wasn’t a bunch of mumbo jumbo nonsense, incantations wouldn’t work against something with a physical presence. You can’t fight evil by chanting a few magic words.”

“‘Religious rituals…’” Em continued, without even looking up for his rant. “‘Ceremony conducted by the high priest of a Wiccan church or a…Magickian’?” She looked up from the screen, frowning. “Is that even a real word?”

“Dunno.” I shrugged. “Do Wiccans have high priests?”

“I have no idea.” Emma leaned over to glance at my screen. “You having any better luck?”

“Not unless you believe that sleeping with scissors under your pillow will prevent midnight ninja incubus attacks.”

“That’s superstitious nonsense.” Tod sank into one of the kitchen chairs, looking more frustrated than I’d ever seen him. “A long time ago, people used to blame fictional incarnations of incubi to cover up an affair or pregnancy out of wedlock. It was this whole, ‘I was raped by a demon’ defense that absolved the ‘victim’ of guilt and gave everyone something intangible to blame. That created this whole legend of ethereal demons that could seduce people in their sleep, like some version of a mara who would molest you instead of scaring you, thus tempting you to damn your own soul by committing sinful acts of sex. Unfortunately, that means that all the methods of fighting these ‘demons’ that come out of that era assume that the incubus has no true physical form.”

“Which means they’re useless to us, since we know incubi are actually thoroughly physical psychic parasites,” I concluded, and Tod nodded.

“That kick to the groin method isn’t looking so bad now, is it?” Emma said.

“Neither are the scissors.”

“We’ll call that plan B,” Tod said, pulling open the fridge in search of another can of soda.

Two hours later, I was starving, and we’d still had no word from my dad or uncle about the family dinner, which I’d invited both Tod and Em to stay for. Nor were we any closer to a decent plan A. Evidently no one in the history of the internet had ever successfully annihilated a real live incubus.

“I think we’re going to have to call it quits on the ambush,” Emma said, closing her laptop with a soft click. “At least for tonight.”

“No!” I refreshed my browser and typed in another variant of the same “banish kill incubus” keyword search I’d been scouring the internet with. “I’m not going to have another night!” And I didn’t want to die without knowing Beck would be no threat to my best friend. “Besides, if we’re not there when he shows up tonight, he’s going to know something’s up, and we’ll have lost the element of surprise. And we—or you guys, since I’ll be dead—won’t get another shot at him if he knows you know what he is.”

Emma shrugged, meeting my gaze reluctantly. “Maybe that’s for the best, Kay. If he figures out what he’s up against, maybe he’ll just…move on.”

“But that’s just passing our problem on to someone else. Someone who won’t know how to fight him.”

“We don’t know how to fight him,” she pointed out, with infuriatingly sound logic. “The lack of information to the contrary suggests that incubi are probably immortal and practically invincible. So what choice do we have, Kaylee? You may be immune to the evil hotness, but I’m not, and I don’t want to walk away from this pregnant with a demon fetus. Or dead because I knew too much.”

“She’s right, Kay,” Tod said. “It’s not fair to involve her in this. Not when we can’t guarantee her safety.”

“I know.” I closed my laptop slowly, burning from the inside out with anger and frustration. “Maybe I could…”

“Not by yourself,” Emma interrupted. “I know you’re going to die anyway.” She swallowed and closed her eyes in a longer-than-normal blink. “But that’s not how you want it to happen, is it?”

“Besides, if Beck shows up at Emma’s house and you’re the only one there—or at least the only one he can see—he’s going to know something’s up,” Tod said.

I couldn’t argue against their logic, but I couldn’t give up the fight, in either my head or my heart. At some point, I’d started equating a “good death”—the only thing I had left to aspire to—with defeating Beck and protecting my school. I didn’t want to die without knowing he’d gone first.

But before I could put any of that into words, my phone rang, and the display showed my dad’s number. I held up a one-minute finger to Em and Tod, then flipped my phone open. “Hey, are you on your way home?” I asked, when I recognized road noise in the background. “Uncle Brendon and Sophie are probably already on their way.”

“Kaylee, I didn’t go to work today. I’m with Brendon, and we’re not going to make it back for dinner. He’s already called Sophie. I’m so sorry, honey.”

Suddenly the kitchen felt too cold and goose bumps popped up on my arms. “Where are you?” I crossed into the living room and started to sit, until I realized I had an almost physical need to keep moving. To burn nervous energy. So I paced back and forth in front of the coffee table.

“On the way home from Tallulah.”

“Tallulah, Louisiana?!”

“Um…yeah. Brendon spent all night tracking down that incubus he ran up against fifteen years ago, and we got lucky.”

“You found him?” I asked, and Tod and Emma followed me into the living room, listening carefully, and dropped onto the couch.

“Yeah, his name is Daniel, and we set out this morning to pay him a visit.”

“Hey, Kay-bear,” my uncle called to me over the line.

“Hi,” I returned, pausing in midstride to stroke Styx’s head when she jumped into the recliner. “So…did this Daniel tell you how to take out an incubus?”

“Well, he wasn’t very forthcoming with any information we could potentially use against him, but he did introduce us to his son—an eight-year-old incubus named Charles. It turns out that Charles is the only reason his father hasn’t relocated or changed his name—he’s trying to give the kid a stable childhood, at least until he comes into his psychic appetite, around puberty.” Which seemed to be typical for most nonhuman species.

“Okay, hurray for Charles and his father-of-the-year.” Unfortunately, I wasn’t hearing anything that would actually help us get rid of Beck.

“That’s not all,” my dad continued, in that “pay attention” tone. “Daniel is a very proud father, and he insisted on introducing Charles to us. Kaylee, the kid’s eyes swirl, and that can only mean one thing. His mother was a bean sidhe.”

“A bean sidhe?” I said, and on the edge of my vision, Emma turned to Tod in question. “I thought incubi had to breed with human women.”

“That’s what I said!” my uncle called, presumably from the driver’s seat. “But Daniel said that inaccuracy is probably due to the fact that they usually do breed with human women for the simple ease of availability.”

“But it’s a bit of a trade-off,” my dad added. “Humans have trouble carrying incubi babies—”

“Yeah, we’ve noticed,” I said, thinking of both Farrah and Danica.

“—and even if they manage to give birth, the baby won’t live more than a few minutes without a soul.”

“Aren’t babies born with souls?” I asked, thoroughly confused.

“Evidently not incubus babies,” my uncle said.

“Okay, so how would a baby incubus get a soul?” I asked, far from sure I actually wanted the answer.

“Well, if the mother dies before the umbilical cord is cut, the baby just kind of…inherits its mother’s soul. That’s what happened with Charles’s mother, although your uncle and I are far from convinced that this poor bean sidhe just happened to die the moment after she gave birth. She wouldn’t have had the same trouble carrying an incubus fetus that a human woman would have.”

Meaning that Daniel had killed the mother of his child, to keep the hard-won infant alive.

I stopped pacing in the middle of the living room, one hand over my eyes, trying to block out that mental image. “That is beyond messed up!”

“What’s messed up?” Emma demanded, and I spared a moment to be grateful that she had decided on her own not to meet with Beck.

“It gets worse, if the mother’s human,” Uncle Brendon called over the traffic noise.

“Worse, how?” I asked, pacing again before I’d even realized my feet were moving.

“A human soul can’t sustain an incubus body,” my dad said, and I could hear the reluctance in his voice. “So if the baby is born from a human mother, there has to be some alternate source of a soul. And it needs to be ready and waiting, if the baby’s going to survive.”

Thoughts spun through my head fast enough to make me dizzy, and I struggled to bring all the facts into alignment. To make sense of the chaos.

Danica and Farrah were both human mothers, so how had Beck intended to keep his children alive after birth? Danica hadn’t made it very far into her pregnancy, so he’d probably thought he had plenty of time to find a soul for her child. But souls can’t be stolen from the living, which meant he must have been prepared to kill some poor nonhuman to donate his or her soul to his son.

And suddenly I was very, very grateful for the dissimulatus bracelets Harmony had given us, which had protected me, Nash and Sabine from notice.

Except that Sabine had read Beck’s fears and creeped him out. Had he figured out she wasn’t human? Had we painted a target on Sabine by sending her in to investigate? Would Beck be reluctant to leave Eastlake, if he knew there was at least one supernatural soul up for grabs there?

“Kaylee?” my father said into my ear, but I was too lost in my own thoughts—still pacing frantically—to answer.

What about Farrah? Her pregnancy had progressed the furthest, thanks to Lydia, and in two short months, he’d have to…

“Oh, hell,” I whispered, as another little bit of understanding clicked into place in my head.

“What?” my dad asked, as Tod and Emma watched me expectantly.

“Lydia…” I dropped into the recliner, and hardly noticed Styx’s squeal when I landed on her tail. “It’s no coincidence they were rooming together.”

“What?” my dad repeated over the phone, while Tod echoed the same question from the couch. But Dad didn’t know about Lydia, and Tod and Em didn’t know incubi babies were born in need of a nonhuman soul. I was the only one with all the pieces of that particular puzzle.

“I just…I think I figured out where Beck was planning to get a supernatural soul,” I said into the phone.

“It’s not…?” my dad started, obviously unable to actually say what I knew he was thinking.

“No, it’s not me. He still thinks I’m human, thanks to the dissimulatus.” I held my arm up to study the braided fiber that had kept me off Beck’s radar—until I’d offered him a three-way with me and Em. “But I think he knows something’s off about Sabine, and one of his earlier victims had a syphon for a roommate.” And suddenly any doubt I’d had about the wisdom of breaking Lydia out of Lakeside was gone. Tod and I had saved not just her life, but her soul.

I wondered if Beck knew yet that his backup soul had flown the coop….

“In case it isn’t obvious,” my dad said. “I do not want you and Emma to go through with this idiotic plan to get your teacher alone tonight.”

“It is obvious. And don’t worry, we’ve already called that off. In fact, I think Emma should stay the night here, just in case.”

“Good idea,” my dad said, and Uncle Brendon piped up with something I couldn’t quite hear.

“What’d he say?”

“He said you should try to get the rest of Emma’s family out of the house tonight, too, just in case.”

Especially considering that Beck had a track record of feeding from his victims’ mothers, and Em’s mom had been alone with Em and her older sisters for as long as I’d known them. The Marshall house was practically an incubus buffet.

“Okay, we’ll come up with something,” I said as Styx laid her head on my lap and closed her eyes. “What time will you be home?”

“We’re still almost six hours away, but hoping to be home a little after midnight. I don’t want to miss any of your last day.”

“I’ll wait up for you.” My heart ached, and I couldn’t quite separate sadness for his loss from my own fear. “I gotta go.”

“Okay, see you tonight.”

I flipped my phone closed, then leaned back in the recliner to slide it into my pocket.

“What are we coming up with?” Em asked, before I could organize everything I needed to tell them into anything resembling coherence. “And what was he saying about babies and souls?”

“It sounds like Beck’s incubus children need a nonhuman soul to survive,” Tod said.

“Yeah.” I was impressed with how much he’d put together based on what little he’d heard. “If the mother’s not human, the incubus will kill her to provide the baby with her soul. But if the mother’s human, he has to find an alternate source.”

Tod nodded grimly. “And you think Beck had something to do with Farrah and Lydia rooming together?”

“I think it’s too much of a coincidence to have happened on its own,” I said. Em still looked confused, but I’d have to explain in the car. It was almost six-thirty. Beck would come calling at eight, if not before. “We need to go get your over night stuff and talk your mom and sisters into leaving for the night. Right now.”

“Hey, Kaylee!” Ms. Marshall stuck her head out of the bathroom when I followed Emma down the hall toward her room. “What are you girls up to tonight?”

“Sleepover at Kaylee’s,” Em said, pulling her sleeping bag from the top of the hall closet.

“On a school night?” Ms. Marshall frowned, her lips out lined, but not yet filled in with lipstick. “I don’t think so….”

“We’re cramming for a big math test,” I said, leaning against the door frame, where I could see them both. “And I swear we’ll get plenty of sleep.” Lies, all lies… When had my life become a series of disasters barely strung together with lies?

“Mr. Cavanaugh’s fine with it, Mom.” Em crossed her room and started pulling clothes from her dresser, as if her mother had already agreed. “And he’ll be there the whole time. This is totally legit.”

Yeah. Legitimately guaranteed to save Emma’s life and keep her uterus unoccupied. Her mother should have been thanking us.

“Besides, you’re going out with Sean tonight, right?” Em zipped her duffel. “This way you could stay the night.”

“Emma!” Ms. Marshall stuck her head into the hall again, curling iron wrapped around a strand of hair all the way up to her skull.

“Oh, come on, Mom. I’m seventeen. I know what happens when the lights go out, and this way you won’t have to drive home in the middle of the night and try to sneak in without waking anyone up.”

Em’s mom released her curl and set the iron down, seeming to consider. “Fine, go stay with Kaylee. But whether or not I spend the night with Sean is none of your business.”

Em grinned. “Duly noted. Cara’s staying at the sorority house tonight, right?”

Ms. Marshall gave her a puzzled look. “Yeaaah. Just like she has every night for the past two years. Why?”

“No reason.” We just had to make sure. “What about Traci?”

“New guy!” Em’s nineteen-year-old sister called from down the hall. “He’s picking me up in fifteen minutes. But that does not mean you can raid my closet.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it…” Em lied, reaching around her mother to grab her makeup bag from the bathroom counter. How the three of them shared one bathroom was beyond me.

Five minutes later, we climbed into Emma’s car and headed back to my house for what would surely be my last sleepover. Ever.